More Lightbulbs

After my moment of realization mentioned in the last post, I feel like I've come to another realization (and with it a resolution) during the last days. I really need to finish my WIPs.

Yeah, I know. I can already see you rolling your eyes, just as when somebody talks about a stash diet that works just as well as a regular diet. ;)

So I'm going to take it slowly. No few glorious goals that are unattainable without strict discipline, as well as giving myself a generous time frame.

The first project that has been bugging me is the Log Cabin Blanket. I mentioned it first on here over a year ago and I'm not even half-way finished. Unacceptable. So I did what I always do with deadline knitting and set myself a deadline (Dec 31 this year) and then started a spreadsheet to track my work.

As some of you may have noticed with my stash counting, I'm a little anal about numbers, so a spreadsheet is perfect for me, because it encourages me to actually work on something since it a) cuts my goal into small achievable goals and b) keeps the project on the forefront of my mind.


(Click to see larger picture)

Now this little sheet counts down the days to Dec 31 (143 as of today) and then allows me to enter the number of stitches I have already knit, as well as calculates how many stitches I have to knit each day to finish by the deadline. And this last part is always what keeps me going. When I knit more than the required stitches per day, it's great to see that number go down (as in the pic above), but at the same time when I don't meet me goal of 1,000 stitches per day, it encourages me to do better instead of discouraging me with feelings of guilt.

For example, didn't knit a stitch on the blanket for two days? No problem. I simply have to knit 15 stitches more each day to compensate for it, instead of having to squeeze these 2,000 missed stitches completely into another day, which always causes my number of missed stitches to just get bigger and bigger, because knitting 3,000 stitches in one day is quite a big deal.

Of course, there are also some disadvantages to this. Since it only counts the number of stitches, but not the difficulty of them, a mix of complex and simple pattern projects are going to be misrepresent during the complex pattern part. Also it doesn't take into account the time needed for seaming (which is going to be a lot for this blanket) or lining, but I still feel that for the majority of the work, it's a great way for me to motivate myself simply by staring at the numbers.

Something else that has been pulling me down is my left-over yarn stash. I have lots of small bits of yarn and also a lot of bigger amounts of left-over sock yarn, so I finally found a way to deal with that. The very small bits get turned into Mini Socks, which I posted about before and which are great fun to knit (at least as long as you don't have to knit the same sock from the same yarn about a dozen times), which is why the larger amounts of left-over yarn are going to be turned into a crochet blanket. Since it's all sock yarn, I don't think I'll have a lot of problems using all the different yarns together and once I have collected enough (I have about 16 ounces at the moment, and need at least 21, better some more) I can figure out the colour succession. I don't want it to simply be a mish-mash of colour, but kinda go from one end of the rainbow to the other (with an overrepresentation of some colours, of course) and so I need to wait until I have all the yarn to figure it out, but I already feel better about all the yarn just knowing that I have a plan for it. And crocheting is such a fast craft that I feel confident about finishing it relatively quickly once I do start.

And in the meantime, I'm simply knitting, knitting, knitting on my WIPs and hoping this need to finish lasts until at least a few of them have been turned into FOs. My startitis is locked away in my desk drawer and from time to time it rattles in there to remind me of all the gorgeous projects I could be starting, but so far I'm resisting unlocking it.